156 



SYDNEY T. KLEIN, F.L.S., F.R.A.S., ON THE 



Science has to do, can have no meaning for us. Our concept of 

 " time " arose necessarily out of our perception of succession of 

 " states of conciousness," which (as Bergson helps us to see) might 

 not be independent units, but the crests of the waves that mark a 

 continuous flow of the duree, rather than a mere line marking the 

 " loci " of a point in motion. And as to our concept of " Space," the 

 speaker thought that the author might, wdth some advantage, have 

 taken into consideration the action of the muscular sense, as the 

 subject was ably treated in the writings of the late Professor 

 Alexander Bain (see his work, The Senses and the Intellect). For 

 his part the speaker thought that the author was quite wrong, in 

 referring our perception of the weight of an object (p. 132) to the 

 sense of touch ; it was evidently arrived at through the muscular 

 sense. In speaking of the sensory impression of {e.g.) a landscape 

 as having no existence for the individual subject except as an image 

 on the retina of the e^^e, and of sounds having no existence except 

 on the tympanum of the ear (p. 141), the author seemed to have 

 overlooked the function of perceptivity seated in the corresponding 

 cerebral ganglia ; as also the fact that there was a storage of such 

 impressions perhaps in the region of " unconscious cerebration " 

 (possibly through a process which Lloyd-Morgan had called 

 " metakinesis "), to make memory possible. 



The speaker thought that since the appearance of Bergson's 

 Creative Evolution, which recognizes "directivity" as a factor of 

 Evolution, it was rather late in the day to full back upon the crude 

 Darwinism dogma of evolution by mere " natural selection " or upon 

 what Bergson calls the " false evolutionism " of Herbert Spencer. The 

 author of the paper seemed to fail to see (1) that a new departure had 

 been taken in the theory of Evolution ; (2) that what concerns the 

 " Transcendental Ego " transcends altogether what belongs to the 

 " Physical Ego " ; and (3) that these lower states of consciousness fall 

 properly within the province of Evolution, as generally understood, 

 while those of the former category lie outside its range. 



Professor Langhorne Orchard thought that their thanks were 

 due to the author for an able paper upon a topic of absorbing 

 interest and for his suggestive experiments with sympathetic bars. 



Upon some points, however, he was unable to agree with the 

 author's affirmations. This non-agreement began with the very 

 first sentence. To say that the knowledge, given by the funda 



